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146 pages

English

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This book is about the virtues and social justice of random distribution. The first chapter is a utopian fragment about a future country, Aleatoria, where everything, including political power, jobs and money, is distributed by lottery. The rest of the book is devoted to considering the idea of the lottery in terms of the conventional components and assumptions of theories of justice, and to reviewing the possible applications of lottery distribution in contemporary society.This revised second edition includes a new introduction.

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	05 novembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781845407360
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0674€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Justice by Lottery
Barbara Goodwin
imprint-academic.com

Copyright page
Copyright © Barbara Goodwin, 1992, 2005
The moral rights of the author has been asserted
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
First edition published 1992 by Harvester Wheatsheaf
Second edition originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
www.imprint-academic.com

Preface to the Second Edition
This book is not about gambling with justice but about lotteries which select, allocate or distribute in the interests of social justice. It argues that on some occasions - more occasions than you might think - it would be appropriate to use such lotteries in the political and social spheres. The ‘lottery principle’ advocated in the book is the principle of random selection or allocation, also referred to as sortition and sometimes described as ‘aleatory’ (meaning ‘decided by dice, by chance’).
In some situations - games, for example - random selection seems intuitively fair and impartial: for example, in a game of cricket, the toss of a coin decides which team should have the advantage or disadvantage of batting first (which it is depends on the state of the pitch). My argument will be that a random selection or choice process, a lottery, may be fair and appropriate in more weighty matters than games. The use of a lottery to make a choice or to select someone or to allocate something may sound frivolous: you may also think that making a random choice sounds irrational . Advocates of the lottery principle, of whom there are a surprising number, would put this differently: the cases where a lottery is evidently the fairest or best decision procedure are cases which show up the limitations of reason . [1] There is another kind of case where lotteries may be applicable: as John Broome states, ‘randomness appears to be a way of bringing some fairness into an inherently unfair situation ’. [2]
Cases which justify random allocation will often be both unfair and beyond reason but these two features do not always or necessarily coincide. The decision about which of two people you will save from a house fire when you cannot save both might be taken by tossing a coin, because such a situation is beyond reasoning, but the house fire can hardly be described as an ‘unfair’ situation, except speaking loosely or metaphorically. In general, though, extreme scarcity and ‘tragic choices’ are examples of situations which are unfair, in that (a) those involved cannot all be treated equally although they have a claim to be treated equally and/or (b) the scarcity or tragic choice is ‘man-made’, since a greater provision (of food in a famine, or dialysis machines) could have avoided the shortage of goods or the tragic choice. In these circumstances, decisions must in a sense be ‘beyond reason’ even though those charged with the decision often produce rationalisations for their choice. The use of lotteries in cases of scarcity and tragic choices is discussed at length in Chapter 7.
The first chapter of the book is a utopian fragment about a future country, Aleatoria, where everything, including political power, jobs and money, is distributed by lottery. The rest of the book is devoted to considering the idea of the lottery in terms of the conventional components and assumptions of theories of justice, and to reviewing the possible applications of lottery distribution in contemporary society. Since the first edition of this work was published a number of major contributions to the subject have been made, some of which are discussed in Chapter 10.
I have discussed the ideas in this book with many academics and other friends and I am grateful for all their responses, whether positive or sceptical; I am also grateful to those who reviewed the first edition. In particular, I would like to thank colleagues who commented on my earlier article on the subject, or who invited me to give papers on justice and lotteries - John Gray, Jack Lively, David Miller, Mark Philp, David Raphael, Lyman Sargent, Adam Swift. I am especially grateful to Bernard Crick and Albert Weale for reading and commenting helpfully on the whole text of the first edition, and to Jon Elster for giving me a copy of his 1987 lectures on ‘Taming Chance’. In connection with the new edition I must thank Conall Boyle for his stimulating paper given at the Royal Statistical Society and for allowing me to see and quote from his current research paper on applications of the lottery principle. My thanks also to Antoine Vergne (a student at the Free University of Berlin) for showing me his work-in-progress on ‘neo-democracy’. My heartfelt thanks go to my husband Michael Miller for challenging my arguments, for referring me to lotteries in the English legal system and for his unsparing use of his computer expertise and time and energy to facilitate the production of the text of the first edition.
Barbara Goodwin
University of East Anglia
May 2005

1 Bernard Williams, in Moral Luck , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 18, argues that ‘the “random” element in such events should be seen … as a reminder that some situations lie beyond justification’.

2 J. Broome, ‘Selecting people randomly’, Ethics 95 , October 1984, p. 40, emphasis added. This is a commonly accepted justification for random procedures although Broome challenges it later in the article.

Part I: Preamble
1: Fragment from the Future
Tenday, Tertia, Decade 8
I, Fortunata Smith (called ‘Lucky’ by my friends), having drawn a five-year ticket as Public Relations (External) Exec, have been allocated an immense task - no less a task than to prepare the voiceover for the new in-flight videdisk which will be played to visiting foreign dignitaries travelling here on the orbishuttle. My commentary must inform them frankly and honestly of all that is best in our social and political system. My last two allocations, as a plumber and as community relations animator in the Northern sector of the London floodplain, have scarcely fitted me for this ambitious endeavour, but I was lucky enough to draw a polyversity place in my youth, and I hope that my studies of logic and rhetoric will aid me now. But it is with great humility and trepidation that I embark on this enterprise, and I hope that the eminent visitors (and my own superiors!) will look leniently on any shortcomings in my commentary. Forsfortuna help me!
Esteemed visitors, welcome aboard the superspeed orbishuttle flight to Aleatoria. Aleatoria is an island off the west coast of Europe, with a population of 200 million. Most of its inhabitants are devotees of Forsfortuna, but there is a substantial Muslim minority. The Christian and Hindu sects were suppressed long ago because their tenets about reward and reincarnation were incompatible with the prevailing ideology. Aleatoria is a republic. It used to be called the United Kingdom, until the signs of disunity became too pressing to ignore. The social cleavages which abounded under the then system of liberal-democratic capitalism eventually brought about a change of political system, and with it a change in our dear country’s name. The Official Chronologers have recorded all these changes and how they came about, and when you disembark you will be presented with a Souvenir Posterity Videdisk which will show you more of our history. But I am going to describe our present state to you. I should say, however, that the Changes involved great disruption. There were periods of dictatorship and oligarchy in the late twentieth century and early this century, interspersed with intervals of complete chaos. After many years of these vicissitudes, a member of the then ruling junta discovered, quite by chance, a revolutionary text in the dusty diskstacks of the National Library - a book called Justice by Lottery . At that time, people in general wanted to go back to a democratic form of government, and they favoured some version of neo-socialism which would be more socially just than the crypto-fascism that had oppressed them for some years. In fact, the junta was very happy to abdicate because the housing riots had reached anarchic proportions and the paras were rampaging all over the country, and making the junta very unpopular. When Adolfa Qdfi (as the junta member was called) described the lottery system proposed in the article to her co-juntees, they agreed that it pointed them to an excellent escape route from their unpalatable situation. They immediately announced that there would be a referendum to approve a new constitution which would save the country from ruin. Then they saturated the population with pro-lottery propaganda. For months, the streetscreens and airwaves were monopolized by mathsists, philos and juntees explaining how just and impartial a lottery society would be. When the referendum was finally held, the great majority agreed that the new Constitution should be the Total Social Lottery. (Those who disagreed were given compulsory exit visas.) So that is how the Great Change came about. To celebrate the new Constitution, we renamed our country Aleatoria. You can see, then, that the system that I am about to describe is the direct result of the people’s choice.
You would probably like to know about our political system first of all. We call it ‘neo-democracy’ because it differs in important respects from the representative democracy of earlier, liberal times, and from the one-party democracies which still survive in some